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Scientists Created the First Successful Human-Animal Hybrids

Scientists
have revealed that they have managed to create a hybrid of a human and animal
in the lab. They said that the success of the project proves that the cells of
a human being can be introduced into an organism that is non-human and they can
survive and go on to grow in a host animal, which in this instance is a pig.

22 People
Every Day Die Waiting for an Organ on the Organ Donor List

This is a
biomedical advancement that scientists have always dreamed about but at the
same time has left scientists in a quandary as they have hoped to be able to
reach a solution to the shortage of donor organs, which is now at a critical
level. Scientists said that every ten minutes someone is put on the national
waiting list to have an organ transplant. Every day 22 people who are waiting
on that list pass away as they have not been given the organ they need. They
posed the question of what if people did not have to rely on the death of
another and a donor as custom organs could be grown inside a host animal.

While this
might sound far-fetched and something out of a movie, scientists are now one
step closer to making this become reality. Researchers from the Salk Institute
said that they have created a chimera: an organism that is able to contain
cells that come from two separate species.

Chimera
Research Is Not Eligible For Funding In the USA

In the past,
this is something that has been out of reach of the scientists. At the moment
experiments such as these are not eligible to receive funding in the US. Up to
this point, Salk and the rest of the team have had to rely on private
donations. Another factor that hampers organism creation that is part animal
and part human is the opinion of the public.

Jun Wu, the
lead study author at the Salk Institute believes that people should look at it
from a different perspective and pointed to mythical chimeras which he said
included human-bird hybrids that people call angels. He went on to say that
ancient civilizations always linked chimeras with God. Ancestors believed that
a chimera will guard over a human and he pointed out that this is what the scientists
hope for with the human-animal hybrid in the future.

Two
Different Ways to Make a Chimera

Basically,
there are two different ways to make a chimera. The first way relies on
introducing organs from one animal to another and this is the riskiest due to
the fact that the immune system of the host could reject the organ. The other
way starts back at an embryonic level when one of the cells of one animal is
introduced to the embryo of the other and they then fuse and grow into the
hybrid. While this might sound strange it does happen to be one way of
eventually being able to solve some of the most puzzling of biological issues
with organs that are grown in the lab.

When stem
cells were first discovered by scientists it looked as though they contained a
scientific promise that was infinite. However, being able to convince the cells
to grow into the organs and tissues that were right was another matter and very
difficult to achieve. The cells need to be able to survive in Petri dishes and
the scientists used what they termed “scaffolds” to try to ensure that the
organs would grow into the correct shapes. Patients would also have to undergo
procedures that were not only invasive but painful too to harvest the tissues
that were needed to start the process.

Pig Lungs
Filter Human Blood In A Lab

Creating a
Human-Animal Chimera Has Taken 40 Years

Juan Carlos
Izpisua Belmonte, a professor at the Salk Institute Gene Expression Laboratory
said that the idea of using a host embryo so that organs could be grown seemed
at first to be something that was straightforward. This, in fact, turned out
not to be so and it took Belmonte and his team over 40 years to work out how to
get a human-animal chimera.

Scientists
had already found a way of taking a mouse and growing pancreatic tissue
belonging to a rat. They revealed that the pancreas had been used to
successfully treat diabetes as parts of the organs had been transplanted into
mice that were diseased.

This is a concept that was taken one step further by
the researchers of the Salk group and they made use of CRISPR, the genome
editing tool, to get into the blastocysts of the mouse. They then deleted the
genes belonging to the mice that need to grow certain organs. The scientists
then introduced the stem cells from rats that would be capable of producing the
organs and found that the cells flourished. The resulting mice lived to become
adult mice and some of them grew chimeric gallbladders that were rat and mouse
cells, despite the fact that rats do not have that organ.

The
researchers then took the stem cells from the rats and they were injected into
the blastocysts of pigs but it failed as pigs and rats have gestation times
that are very different. Pigs, on the other hand, do have a similarity to
humans and their organs look a great deal like those of humans. The task was
still not easy as scientists had to get the timing perfect when introducing the
cells of humans to the pigs so that they did not kill them.

Chimeric
Embryos Have 1 In 100,000 Human Cells

Ju Wu said
that they had tried three types of cells from humans during the experimental
process. Finally, they found that naïve pluripotent cells would not last as
long as ones with more development. The embryos survived when they injected the
human cells that were just right into the pig embryos. These were then put into
the adult pigs, which were left to carry them for about four weeks before being
removed and then analyzed. 186 late stage chimeric embryos survived with each
of them having about 1 in 100,000 cells from humans.

Scientists
are now trying to work out if it is going to be possible to boost the number of
human cells as the number is low right now. It is thought that it might take
many more years before human organs that are functioning will be seen, but the
work has been described as being a breakthrough.

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